Written literature in Gikuyu is one of Africa’s most dynamic and lively literatures. There are strong and active traditions of fictional and journalistic writing in the language. There have also been publications in a wide range of additional genres including studies of history and culture, autobiographical writing, and religious publications. Engagement with issues of human rights, economic and social equality, and political freedom has been central to many works written in Gikuyu and to nearly all contemporary writing in the language. Works written in Gikuyu were frequently banned by the British colonial government and more recent works have been suppressed by the two post-independence governments of Kenya.

The earliest publications in Gikuyu were Gikuyu/English (1903, 1904, 1905) and Gikuyu/Italian (1910, 1919/1921) vocabulary lists and grammatical sketches produced by Protestant and Catholic missionary presses primarily for the benefit of British and Italian missionaries in their work converting Gikuyu speakers to Christianity. These publications were produced as part of conversion and Bible translation projects, but were not made widely available. The Gikuyu/Italian materials were produced by Catholic missionaries from Italy. The New Testament of the Bible was first published in Gikuyu in 1926. The Old Testament was not published until 1951, but some books of the Old Testament were available earlier. Early missionary press publications directed at converts included religious publications such as J. M. Kelsall’s Ũhoro wa Ngoma ĩrĩa Njũru na Mũgate (1931) (Information concerning the Njũru and Mũgate Dances). The major writers in Gikuyu have all been educated in Christian schools and have been familiar with biblical language, imagery, and narratives.

Postcolonial literature is usually produced by such younger writers as Caryl Phillips in England and Calixthe Beyala in France, who are part of minority diasporas in what were colonizing nations; they are especially, but not exclusively, those born and raised after independence. This literature is a result of the massive migrations of recent decades and the growing global economic market in which education and jobs are available to those from former colonies. One explanation of these diasporas might be “We are here because you were there” (Frankenberg and Mani 1993: 293). The “postcolonials” have replaced the “colonials” as the persons moving from one culture to another. The large-scale movement of people from their countries of origin is a salient feature of the contemporary world.

Postcolonial literature is distinct from theories of post colonialism and post-colonial studies. While the term “postcolonial” is used historically to mean literature written after the era of colonialism, postcolonial cultural studies critically analyzes the continuing relationship of colonial powers to those they had colonized and often treats nationalist governments and their nativist culture as reactionary or neocolonial. Postcolonial studies are anticolonial; most forms of dominance are viewed as imperial and those dominated as colonized victims. Postcolonial analysis tends to be antagonistic to literary art; elite culture is to be deconstructed to reveal its hidden assumptions, including complicity with the colonizers. The colonizers’ culture is to be appropriated to resist, to answer back.

Mississippian religion was a distinctive Native American belief system in eastern North America that evolved out of an ancient, continuous tradition of sacred landscapes, shamanic institutions, world renewal ceremonies, and the ritual use of fire, ceremonial pipes, medicine bundles, sacred poles, and symbolic weaponry. Mississippian people shared similar beliefs in cosmic harmony, divine aid and power, the ongoing cycle of life and death, and spiritual powers with neighboring cultures throughout much of eastern North America. Although similarities in religious practices and rituals existed throughout the Mississippian world, individual polities possessed divergent trajectories of religious thought that over time resulted in differing paths of belief and ritual.

Above all, Mississippian people were logical, pragmatic, and rational in their religious beliefs, and their observations and thoughts about the world around them were reflected in their views of the spiritual world. Their rituals and sacred narratives embodied abstract meanings, archaic language, complex symbolism, and esoteric metaphors. The numerous and widespread Mississippian polities gave rise to a remarkable tradition of religious beliefs and practices. Their religious system flourished for more than half a millennium as a meaningful and vibrant set of beliefs. Identifying the circumstances, complexity, and nature of Mississippian religion is a major focus of current research among a number of scholars, including anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, folklorists, and historians. Although scholars debate various points of religious belief, there is general agreement on the overall religious traditions.

That complex sequence of events which we have come to refer to as the scientific revolution brought about radical changes not merely in the content of the explanations accepted but also in the forms of explanation considered appropriate. The idea that one of the main aims – perhaps the main aim –of a natural philosopher should be the discovery of the laws governing the natural world emerged clearly for the first time during the seventeenth century. The Greeks had made little use of any concept of a law of nature. The phrase itself occurs infrequently indeed in the original texts (though more often in some translations), and when it can be found, its manner of use often seems to suggest that the whole idea was recognised as being odd and somewhat paradoxical. Given the extremely wide acceptance in the post-sophistic period of a fundamental antithesis between nomos (law, or convention) and phusis (nature), the marginal character of any idea of a law of nature is easy to understand. Even in later centuries, however, when the force of the nomos–phusis antithesis had greatly weakened and the idea of a moral law of nature had become familiar and widely accepted, there was still no parallel acceptance of any idea of nature as a system governed by, and explicable in terms of, physical laws. The theory of scientific explanation set out by Aristotle and accepted by such scientists as Ptolemy and Galen had no room for any such concept. Aristotelian explanations – or, rather, explanatory ideals – were essentialist in that they took as their fundamental premises definitions setting out the essences of things. There was no way in which anything analogous to Newtonian laws of motion could be inserted into such explanations, and neither Aristotle nor any of his successors made the slightest attempt to do so.

NEWTON AND BEYOND

In the preface to his work on the metaphysical foundations of Newton’s science, Kant wrote that ‘since in any doctrine of nature there is only as much proper science as there is a priori knowledge therein, a doctrine of nature will contain only as much proper science as there is mathematics capable of application there’. Precisely because it is so radically uncompromising, Kant’s statement echoes much of the whole orientation of eighteenth-century natural philosophy. The Newtonian scheme of thought was proving a perfect instrument for research because something more fundamental and more general than Newton’s laws of motion had been discovered by means of mathematical exposition which was of greater universality than that employed by Newton himself. The successful outcome of such an ambitious enterprise was so significant that Kant went on to exclude chemistry from the realm of science proper on the grounds that, contrary to mathematical physics, the principles of chemistry ‘are merely empirical, and allow of no a priori presentation in intuition … they do not in the least make the principles of chemical appearances conceivable with respect to their possibility, for they are not receptive to the application of mathematics’ (Ak 4: 471). Kant seems not to have realised soon enough the significance of Lavoisier’s work in the 1770s, which practically founded chemistry on its present basis; after Lavoisier, chemical science had only to wait for the atomic theory in the next century. However in his later, post-critical work, Kant embarked on the ambitious project of including chemical phenomena in a wider metaphysical concept.

In the amalgam of languages and cultures that is the Caribbean, it is almost impossible to reach complete agreement on the origin of any of the art forms that have emerged as distinctly Caribbean. In colonial times, the European masters naturally replicated their cultures in this new-found milieu, although they did make a few concessions to the presence and input of other communities – the indigenous ones they found on arrival, and those from Africa and from India in particular. In the postcolonial societies of the Caribbean, the newly independent states have found themselves faced with an intriguing cultural choice. On one hand, they can discard what was brought by the Europeans and stick to what they have produced themselves – often labeled “folk” or “local” to set it apart from the more established extra-Caribbean equivalents. On the other, they can retain Eurocentric values, traditions, and art forms, and in so doing risk giving the impression that they are renouncing their cultural independence. Naturally, it would be highly impractical for societies in the West Indies – still the familiar name for the anglophone territories referred to in our title – to attempt to choose one of the foregoing over the other. In reality, several values and traditions have come together to produce authentic, unique art forms that are both similar to those of Europe, and sufficiently dissimilar from them to be distinctly Caribbean or West Indian. Carnival fits this pattern, as does drama.

The importance of the eighteenth century for interpreting religion is commonly recognised; but how its importance is perceived depends on where one sees its outcome. It was a time of intense disagreement about the nature and worth of religion. A student at Cambridge in the early years of the following century – say, around 1810 – would have been confident that the redoubtable Archdeacon Paley had finally vindicated religion, both natural and revealed, against a hundred years of criticisms. The doors of the church and the academy were still open for business as usual. Today’s admirer of the Enlightenment is more likely to find the representative figure in the sceptical David Hume or the acid Voltaire, their exposure of frail arguments and pious absurdities being taken as the final antidote to conventional religion. Yet others may think that at the end of the eighteenth century the meagre religious insights of the Enlightenment, such as they were, were taken up in various ways into the grander visions of Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Still, there would be general agreement that the eighteenth century raised good questions about religion, whoever is held to have come up with the best answers.

Old theological controversies endured; frequently, they became entangled in domestic politics. But the main interest of the period for religious thought arises out of questions brought to the forum of public debate by the Deists. The participants in the debate, including both the defenders and the critics of religion, held overconfident opinions that time would prove to be much more parochial than they imagined. On all sides, limited perceptions of the essence, benefits, and defects of religion were naively universalised, and obstinate stereotypes of a complex and elusive mode of human behaviour were bequeathed to future generations.

The two extremes of eighteenth-century reflection on the foundations of revealed religion are marked in continental Europe by two major German philosophers: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The beginning of the century saw the last, productive years of Leibniz’s life – years in which doctrines already present in his youth, matured and refined during the course of many decades, were finally committed to paper in such works as the Nouveaux essais (1703–1705), the Théodicée (1710), the Monadologie (1714) and the Principes de la nature et de la grace (1714). The end of the century saw the appearance of the early writings of Hegel, known as his Theologische Jugend-schriften (1793–1800) – writings which disclose the origins of Hegel’s dialectic and exhibit in a graphic way, through the consideration of the figure of Jesus, the shift from the Enlightenment-Kantian interpretive paradigm of Christian religion to the new dialectical paradigm. The change of perspective during the intervening century regarding the philosophical justification of revealed (or, as it would increasingly be called, positive) religion could hardly have been more radical. Leibniz summarised the debate on the relationship between faith and reason inherited from an ancient tradition and renewed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in all its urgency by the Protestant Reformation, and he gave the thesis of the conformity between the two perhaps its most coherent expression. Hegel opened the door to the nineteenth century with a new set of philosophical issues regarding the value and foundations of revealed religion.

TWO COMPETING TENDENCIESo

By the seventeenth century, theology had established constraints on the development of metaphysics not unlike those it had imposed nearly a millennium earlier on church music. Like the cantus firmus, to which counterpoint and polyphony are conjectured to owe their existence, these constraints were both a source of problems and a standard for success. In the seventeenth century, a main cantus firmus was the notion of God as creator ex nihilo. Although the dogma was not without ambiguity as late as the Council of Nicea (a.d. 325), creation of the world ex nihilo had been defined against the dualism of the Albigensians and Cathars by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): ‘We firmly believe in God … the creator [creator] of all things visible and invisible, spiritual and corporeal, who by His almighty power established, from nothing, at the same time from the beginning of time, both spiritual and corporeal creatures [simul ab initio temporis utramque de nihilo condidit creaturam spiritualem et corporalem].’ In addition, and against the same opponents, the church insisted upon the providence of God that allowed evil in creation. Thus, although omnipotent, God nonetheless was believed to create with wisdom. God's wisdom was a divine attribute that in the seventeenth century gained metaphysical prominence even as final causes were being expunged from physical explanations.

The seventeenth century was not notably more successful than any previous period in making sense of the notion of creation ex nihilo. Greek antiquity found the notion unintelligible and rejected it. But constrained by their theology, the mediaevals were obligated to embrace the notion, not without philosophical difficulty. Aquinas, for example, adopted a position found at least as early as the fourth century in Gregory of Nyssa according to which God's creation is absolutely free, yet necessarily motivated solely by the communication of His goodness

COLLOQUIAL UNDERSTANDINGS, INHERITED TRADITIONS

The seventeenth century inherited a long and palimpsestic list of affections which served as a form of definition of the passions. No one could ignore the fact that among the principal examples were joy and distress in their many forms; hope, fear, and their variants; and desires in all their diversity. To enumerate these affections was thus one way of explaining what the category included, and interpretations of the category were in turn elaborated in the light of this canonical list. At the same time, discussions of what the passions are for, and of their part in human action, were articulated against a complex background of received assumptions. Some of these derived specifically from earlier philosophical traditions, while others were embedded in a wider range of practices such as medicine, pedagogy, and Christian meditation. Together, they formed an understanding of the passions which was sustained in relatively conventional treatments of the subject and was at the same time bound to inform any attempt at philosophical innovation.

Several threads of this loosely woven fabric stand out in discussions of the metaphysical and psychological aspects of the passions. Most striking, perhaps, is the shared presupposition that the passions are, in a broad sense, functional. Humans are endowed with instinctive drives or appetites for warmth, food, and so forth. But they also possess a less bioligically basic set of dispositions which incline them to seek out states of affairs that are conductive to their well-being, and to avoid states that are detrimental to it.

Francophone African literature is a product of the fait colonial, France’s colonial conquest that brought French schools to her African colonies north and south of the Sahara, educational institutions whose mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) was to bring French civilization to the “dark continent.” Examining the process of colonization in French Africa, we can trace the earliest beginnings of the civilizing mission to Abbé Grégoire, the former Bishop of Blois who, in 1808, published De la littérature des nègres (On Black African Literature), a text that affirms the ability of the African to master literature, the arts, and science (Blair 1976: 1–3). In his text, Abbé Grégoire comments on the literary talent of Phillis Wheatley, the Senegalese slave sold to a rich Boston merchant, John Wheatley, who educated her. As a result, she became a respected poet of her time. However, Wheatley’s “enlightened” colonial attitude that encouraged the education of his African slave promoted the objective of disseminating European culture to Africans without appreciating African culture in return. The prevailing view throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries was, as Christopher Miller notes, to describe Africa as nothing more or less than a “blank darkness.” In this vein, the critic adds: “The notion of a nullity is a key to understanding European conceptions of Black Africa” (1985: 17).

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries initiated, directed, and staffed many schools in the colonies, but secular schools were established as well. General Faidherbe, whose colonial army had conquered Senegal in the 1860s and 1870s, astutely understood that Muslims would be more apt to send their children to secular schools rather than those directed by Christian missionaries.